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Goodbye Lenin and The German Democratic Republic

Uploaded by treg15uk on Jan 08, 2008

On the whole, does Goodbye, Lenin paint a positive or negative picture of life in communist East Germany?

Ben Gould

Word Count: 2235

East Germany, its demise relayed through the mass media of recent history, has in popular consciousness been posited as negative, a corrupt bulwark of the last dying days of Communism in Eastern Europe, barren and silent. The other Germany to its West, its citizens free, was striding confidently ahead into the millennium. Recent cinema has sought to examine re-unification, the Wolfgang Becker film Goodbye Lenin! (2003) a recent example of such an investigation into the past through cinema. In this essay I will look at the film and the narrative techniques it uses, probing whether it portrays the East German nation as positive or negative, concluding that though many negatives are identified, some positives are deduced from Honecker’s state. I will also consider why, in recent times, East Germans have come to regard their former state with nostalgia, or as the Germans would put it, ostalgie, an act which Goodbye Lenin! (2003) explores.

Not a doom laden, emphatically political treatise on the reunification of East and West Germany but a touching and sometimes comedic insight into the gargantuan changes impacting on the small scale; day to day life as experienced by an East German family, Christiane Kerner and her two children Alex and Ariane. Awaking from a coma, Alex fears his mother’s condition may worsen if she learns of re-unification, going to increasingly elaborate lengths in maintaining the illusion of the GDR's omniscience. Becker’s stance as to reunification is ambivalent throughout, the film's concerns not didactic but subtly relayed. How the personal and political interweave is skilfully constructed by Becker, assessing the extent to which the society we live within affects us, how far its changing social landscape impacts our private one. Goodbye Lenin! (2003) appropriates the individual as bound to his environment, threaded, through strong cultural codes, to his neighbour. Regardless of the system, communist or capitalist, and though our goals may deviate, we are all pursuing happiness and comfort, the tools used to attain this products of that society. That said, it is immediately legible whereabouts Becker wishes us to view the East German state as wholly negative, and he does this through several key scenes.

At the film's opening, we learn of the first East German shot into space, surely an apotheosis of what a state can achieve,...